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Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy finan
by IIAOPSW 11mo ago
Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain.
- JeremyNT 11mo ago> Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain. My hypothesis is that his current heavy handed editorial intervention is designed to convince only a single person: the President of the United States. It's presumably worth burning the paper's reputation in order to curry favor with a mercurial and vengeful autocrat who controls the power of the federal government's purse. In 3 (or 7?) years, perhaps he will reevaluate.
- netsharc 11mo ago[flagged]
- p_j_w 11mo agoI think many people, even here, are infected with “It can’t happen here.”
- serial_dev 11mo agoThe best predictor of future events is past experience. Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too. Similarly, some people always think that the current president will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never ever be able to get into power. And these people have been so far always wrong. I’m not saying it can’t happen this time, but in my opinion, it is unlikely. The real skeptical in me says it doesn’t even matter, no matter who you vote for, you’ll get John McCain.
- gryfft 11mo ago> The best predictor of future events is past experience. I have never died before, not once in my life. The most likely outcome is that I will live forever.
- strictnein 11mo ago> I have never died before, not once in my life. The most likely outcome is that I will live forever. They didn't say that this is always true for every situation forever. They said "The best predictor of future events is past experience". Keyword is "best". You being alive today is the best predictor of you being alive tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.
- jakelazaroff 11mo agoOkay, so "me being alive today is the best predictor of me being alive in 150 years".
- strictnein 11mo agoNope. Everyone who is alive 150 years ago is dead. So the best predictor of being dead 150 years from now is to be alive currently (or already dead).
- jakelazaroff 11mo agoThat's the point: you can "prove" anything by saying "the best predictor of future events is past experience" and then pointing to the obvious wrong past experience from which to extrapolate.
- strictnein 11mo agoI'm unsure where you thought we were talking about "proving" anything with these statements? Forming illogical counter-examples doesn't show that the original premise was false, just that one can form clearly wrong examples of this. No one has ever lived 150 years. Therefore there is nothing that can be predictive of living 150 years. One is starting with something that is known to be incorrect and then working backwards to phrase it in a similar way.
- Gud 11mo agoDoes it matter? Trump has destroyed what little good there was in the Republican Party.
- goatlover 11mo agoIt's amazing how much he's turned it into a cult of personality to the point that things like states rights, free markets and Federal overreach no longer matter.
- rgblambda 11mo agoI imagine, post-Trump, it will take possibly a decade for a cohesive conservative party in the U.S. to re-establish itself.
- ClownsAbound 11mo ago[dead]
- dullcrisp 11mo agoI think the solution should ideally be not electing Trump (or whomever) in a free and fair election. What solution are you suggesting?
- tlogan 11mo ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 11mo agoIunno, I'm willing to give Trump a fair shake but none of those descriptors seem particularly wrong to me. Trump runs on quid-pro-quo politics, for better and worse. It stands to reason that the most blatantly-corrupt people in America are now in a race to the bottom to buy out their pardon and negotiate protectionist foreign policy.
- tomhow 11mo ago> Why there is so much of TDS on hacker news? Please don't use epithets like this on HN. Snark, swipes, name-calling are all explicitly against the guidelines. We're trying for curious conversation here, not whatever this is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- adventured 11mo agoBezos is calculating his years remaining with regards to Blue Origin and that a given President can cause severe disruption to the pathway Bezos has in mind for his organization. I'm sure his ideal would be to finely balance WaPo's reputation and his need to placate the current President, and I'm also certain with Trump it's not doable (so he'll sacrifice some of WaPo's reputation to keep progress going on Blue Origin during the Trump years).
- rtpg 11mo agoI do enjoy the theory that everyone was cynically posturing for 4 years during Biden and are now _also_ cynically posturing for Trump, because it aligns with a belief that a lot of powerful people seem to have extremely malleable beliefs. It is a bit more interesting than "everyone took their mask off the day after the election". Plenty of hard-line right wing people in the world, of course, but at one point if you're that deep in the right all the posturing pre-2024 would be really hard to do. But if it's all cynical then any amount of posturing makes sense!
- dangus 11mo agoI’m not convinced the layperson is aware. I would bet that something like 80 or 90% of Washington Post subscribers don’t know who owns the paper, and I would save you the same thing about the Wall Street Journal.
- jquery 11mo agoI didn't know who owned WaPo until Bezos started putting his thumb on the scale.
- softwaredoug 11mo agoThese billionaires don't have a solid feedback loop back to reality
- findthewords 11mo agoThink about the world's poorest man, and how disconnected he is from the rest of humanity. Now think of the world's richest man. They are equally disconnected.
- rkomorn 11mo agoThe world's poorest man probably has tens millions of peers within an order of magnitude of "poorness". The world's richest man has at most a few hundred.
- saulpw 11mo agoExact numbers as of today: Elon Musk has $500b. 32 other people have at least $50b. 827 people have at least $5b.
- singleshot_ 11mo agoRoughly half of Americans have a negative net worth.
- rkomorn 11mo agoSo I overestimated a few hundred, and it's actually a few dozens.
- psychoslave 11mo agoHmm, the initial comment was disconnection from realty, not humanity. Most likely, reality as, all this daily throttle that recalls you that you are not the center of the universe and you have to been to its laws which were not fine tuned to please human desire if you want to accomplish anything. In that sense most humans are closer to the poorest man.
- 11mo ago
- pydry 11mo agohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo... He even wrote an editorial saying "the news media isnt trusted, we have to do better". Then he decided he didnt want to do better.
- blitzar 11mo ago> Then he decided he didnt want to do better. I am fairly certain he decided to and is executing "do better" - nevertheless the 1 or 2 people with net worths of 100's of billions have different opinions on what "better" looks like than the other 8 billion of us.
- mmooss 11mo agoI think many people (and the parent comment) are getting played because they don't realize the game and its stakes: 'Trust' is an issue under the old rules, in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all and where therefore public trust and a well-informed public mattered. The new rules are about power alone, which is essentially anti-democratic. Bezos has power and he demonstrates it - demonstration is essential under the new rules - by mocking and thumbing his nose at trust and at informing the public. He uses his power to bend public opinion his way; lots of people still read the Post, and in a post-truth world, truth doesn't matter to many of them. He doesn't care about trust, and he actively and intentionally demonstrates it. It's the context of post-truth philosophy: Words are about power, they are weapons; they are not about truth, expression, or information. The worship (rather than distrust) of power, post-truth, it all leads to the non-democratic outcome.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jquery 11mo agoIMO, the rules haven't changed at all, shit has always been bad. Ask any Black American. The silver lining to all this open corruption is that even the most milquetoast centrists of 2020 are turning into people calling for actual consequences for the corruption going on in our government. As unpopular as Bush was in 2008, not very many people seriously thought he would be or even should be arrested. I think the patience of good people is getting severely tested in 2025 though, I think by 2028, or sooner, people will be demanding scalps.
- mmooss 11mo ago> IMO, the rules haven't changed at all, shit has always been bad. Ask any Black American. What, of the things I described, have Black Americans experienced more than others? > even the most milquetoast centrists of 2020 are turning into people calling for actual consequences for the corruption going on in our government. I see the opposite: Look at congressional and other Dem leaders - they talk about economics and healthcare despite everything else going on.